Friday, September 9, 2011

New Feature: CME Rogue's Gallery

We've been beefing up the Carlat CME Institute, a website whose mission is to support excellence in non-industry-funded CME. Our latest feature is the "CME Rogue's Gallery" in which we keep a running list of the most blatantly promotional CME programs that cross our path. Currently we are spotlighting a program funded by Mylan Pharmaceuticals to increase prescription of the MAOI EMSAM, and a program created by Stephen Stahl, funded by Avanir, to increase prescriptions of Nuedexta.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I dared to write today because lately my mind has been wracked by a difficult dilemma. I am a general surgeon and I have already completed my residency but this field is definitely not my vocational one. For some time now I have been thinking of beginning a new residency, and it seems to me that I could dare to follow my instinct. I have the deep felling that psychiatry is my calling, not a very rational feeling based on many solid arguments as I didn’t have an extended interaction with this specialty. Mainly I wish for something more inner oriented and providing a training that will allow to better understand my nature and simultaneously the others. On this particular moment I fell that I am a man trying to make a good decision but I fear that this move could finally be done a little bit too sudden, like a big leap into a dark zone without the proper tools or knowledge. By all accounts I am conscious it is a great change, but I motivate myself to become more fearless and somehow to master my doubts. I wish to explore a little bit in advance, to have just a glimpse, throughout your answers (if you will be so king to consider giving me one), the concept of being a psychiatrist , to gain some inside information about the ordinary life of a psychiatrist, the everyday challenges and difficulties one must confront and overcome. Basically I want to know if it could be hard for someone with a somatic background to reshape his pattern of thinking and found interest and finally joy in this field of psychiatric disorders?I know for a fact that I am a high motivated individual with a positive attitude towards new challenges and I feel prepared on the rational level but am I really prepared emotionally to climb this abrupt slope facing my career? I am not trying to spin this as a "my tragedy” kind of story and have a covered incognito counseling session via your blog. I will not dress it up in the narrative of a surgeon trying to find the metaphor in life and all that nonsense. This isn’t a tragedy, not in the Greek sense of tragedy describing a character's fall from grace due to an unrecognized, fatal moral flaw nor in the modern sense of it. I am just trying to avoid, with your help, a decision made in circumstances characterized by a momentary lack of information. I deeply believe that one’s actions reflect on the intrinsic worth of the individual so, for not devaluating mine in my near future, I dare to ask you:- Is psychiatry suitable for a guy with prior surgical background?- If am I to follow my instincts and pursue this specialty will I be capable enough to adapt to the new environment of pathologies given the facts that I am 35 years old and I have a rather rigid and “catesian” education?Please excuse my lack of eloquence, but as you have already noticed throughout my words, English is not my maternal language.Please be so kind and not judge me so hard for my daring. André